Elder Taylor arrived in Paris about the 18th or 19th of December. On the 2nd of the same month Louis Napoleon by his famous _coup d'etat_ had overthrown the first republic succeeding the government of Louis Philippe; and in the meantime had sketched the more despotic constitution which was to succeed it, with himself elected President for ten years. Paris was in the hands of the soldiers; her streets had recently been soaked with blood; many of the buildings had been battered down into shapeless ruins; and about five hundred prisoners, untried before any tribunal--even that of a drum-head court martial--had been shipped off to Cayenne. It happened, too, that the day appointed for the holding of this conference was the very day on which the people were to vote for Napoleon for president--it would evidently be a day of excitement; and altogether the circumstances would have been considered sufficient, by ordinary men, to have postponed the conference indefinitely. Not so with Elder Taylor. A French revolution was not to hinder him in his work. The revolution would give the authorities of Paris something else to do than to look after him. So the conference was held. There were about four hundred represented at the conference. A number of elders, priests and teachers were ordained; a conference was regularly organized and a presidency appointed over the Church in France. "At the very time they [the French people] were voting for their president," Elder Taylor remarks, "we were voting for our president; and building up the kingdom of God; and I prophesied that our cause would stand when theirs is crushed to pieces; and the kingdom of God will roll on and spread from nation to nation, and from kingdom to kingdom." It scarcely need be said that the prophecy has been, or is being fulfilled. The work the French people did that day was undone in less than a year by the usurping "Prince President" becoming Emperor, and crushing out the life of the republic by founding a despotism as absolute as any kingdom of the middle ages; and which in its turn was violently overthrown, a few years afterwards, by another revolution. Meantime the kingdom of God goes steadily forward--slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely on that account. The Almighty is not anxious to reap results today from promises He laid down yesterday. The oak grows slowly; but every year adds something to its size; the winds which beat upon it only fix its mighty roots deeper in the earth and increase the strength of its fiber; and at last, in spite of slowness of growth, in spite of howling tempest and the thunder-bolt, the grand oak stands monarch of the forest. So shall it be with the kingdom of God among the nations of the earth. Elder Taylor's mission in France and Germany was now completed; and he began making his arrangements for returning home. It was the day after the conference in Paris that he started for England, intending to call at the Channel Islands _en route_.